Paula Fox, Novelist Who Chronicled Dislocation, Dies at 93

Paula Fox, a distinguished writer for children and adults whose work illuminated lives filled with loss, dislocation and abandonment, conditions she knew firsthand from a very early age, died on Wednesday in Brooklyn. She was 93.

Her death, at a hospital near her home, was confirmed by her daughter, Linda Carroll-Barraud.

Ms. Fox wrote a half-dozen novels for adults and more than 20 books for young people. What united her output was a cool, elegant style that was haunting in its pared-down economy; minute observation; masterly control of tone and pacing; and an abiding concern with dissolution — of family, of home, of health, of trust.

Her characters are complex, self-contained and often withdrawn, but their ruminative interior states lend the narratives a quiet luminosity.

Ms. Fox’s best-known novel for adults is “Desperate Characters” (1970), about the disintegration of a marriage. It was made into a film of the same title, released the next year and starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars.

She was awarded the Newbery Medal, considered the Pulitzer Prize of children’s literature, in 1974 for “The Slave Dancer,” a controversial novel centered on the Atlantic slave trade in the mid-19th century.

Her work also includes two memoirs: “Borrowed Finery” (2001), about her peripatetic childhood, and “The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe” (2005), about her young womanhood.

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“Desperate Characters,” published in 1970, was about the disintegration of a marriage. It was made into a film of the same title starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars.Credit...Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Ms. Fox’s bibliography took readers from cradle to grave, something few other writers have done. It includes picture books for young children, like “Traces” (2008), a poem, illustrated by Karla Kuskin, about the evanescent signs — think of footprints and vapor trails — left by unseen visitors. It also includes many titles for middle-grade readers and teenagers, among them “Blowfish Live in the Sea” (1970), about a child’s journey to visit the father he has never met; “One-Eyed Cat” (1984), about the painful consequences of a boy’s casual shot with an air rifle; and “The Eagle Kite” (1995), about a boy whose father has AIDS.

Because so much of Ms. Fox’s work was for young people, her fiction for adults was sometimes overlooked. In 1984, The Nation described her as “one of our most intelligent (and least appreciated) contemporary novelists.”

In later years, however, her adult books enjoyed something of a renaissance, thanks largely to the efforts of the novelist Jonathan Franzen, who became an ardent champion after devouring an out-of-print copy of “Desperate Characters” he had come across by chance.

A new edition of “Desperate Characters,” with an introduction by Mr. Franzen, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1999. Ms. Fox’s other adult novels — among them “The Widow’s Children,” “A Servant’s Tale” and “The God of Nightmares” — have also been re-released by Norton, with introductions by writers including Frederick Busch, Andrea Barrett and Rosellen Brown.

As a stylist, she was known for her impeccable, almost anatomical, depictions of the material world. In the Paula Fox universe, objects take on heightened importance, as if rearing up to fill the gaps left by characters’ failure to make real connections. This is painfully evident in the opening scene of “Desperate Characters,” which examines the brittle marriage of a professional couple — yuppies long before the term was coined — living in a fine Brooklyn home:

“Mrs. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast.”

In the pages that follow, Sophie is bitten by a stray cat, an event that sets in motion the dissolution of her marriage to Otto. The great risk of being alive, nearly all of Ms. Fox’s work seemed to say, is that anything can happen to anyone at any time.

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Paula Fox offered closely observed portraits of loss and abandonment. It was terrain she knew all too well.Credit...Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Paula Fox was born in Manhattan on April 22, 1923, to parents who did not want her. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, was an undistinguished novelist and playwright who earned his living as a script doctor. Her mother, the former Elsie de Sola, of Spanish and Cuban extraction, was young, vain, cold “and ungovernable in her haste to have done with me,” as Ms. Fox wrote in “Borrowed Finery.”

Paul and Elsie floated through the 1920s and ’30s in a sea of alcohol, Hollywood parties and European travel, none of which, they made plain, was best experienced with a child in tow. When Paula was a few days old, she was left, at her mother’s insistence, in a foundling hospital. From there, she embarked on her itinerant young life, bouncing among a series of friends, relatives and strangers across the country and in Cuba, where she lived for a time on a sugar plantation with her grandmother.

Periodically, her parents would turn up, and Paula would be returned to their dubious care. By the time she was 16, she was more or less on her own.

There was one happy interlude. When Paula was 5 months old, she was taken in by a stranger, the Rev. Elwood Amos Corning, in a small Hudson Valley town aptly named Balmville, N.Y. A kind, scholarly man who lived with his mother, Mr. Corning taught Paula about books and nature and history. She lived with him till she was 6, when her parents swooped down and parceled her out somewhere else.

Ms. Fox studied piano briefly at the Juilliard School in Manhattan and later attended Columbia University. She held a series of odd jobs, including modeling, reporting on the postwar reconstruction of Poland for a British news service and teaching emotionally disturbed children.

As a teenager, Ms. Fox had what she referred to as a “brief, disastrous marriage”; her second marriage, to Richard Sigerson, ended in divorce. In 1962, she married Martin Greenberg, a brother of the art critic Clement Greenberg. They had met when Martin, then an editor at Commentary magazine, rejected a story Ms. Fox had submitted.

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“The Slave Dancer,” which centered on the Atlantic slave trade in the mid-19th century, won a Newbery Medal.Credit...Bradbury Press

Critical response to Ms. Fox’s work over the years was largely favorable, though there was sometimes dissent. Her Newbery Medal for “The Slave Dancer” inspired a protest at the awards ceremony that year: The novel, which tells the story of a white New Orleans youth conscripted to play the fife on a slave ship in the 1840s, had been condemned by some reviewers for portraying the captured African slaves as a passive, undifferentiated group.

In 1997, while visiting Jerusalem, Ms. Fox was mugged and suffered serious brain injury. The incident, she said afterward, prompted her to begin writing her first memoir, “Borrowed Finery.” Her recovery was so arduous that it took her a year to write the book’s first 10 pages.

At the end of “Borrowed Finery,” Ms. Fox tells of being reunited with the daughter she had borne at 20, the offspring of a brief liaison after her first marriage had ended. She gave the infant up for adoption, a decision, she wrote, that pained her the rest of her life. In middle age, the daughter, Ms. Carroll-Barraud, found Ms. Fox. (One of Ms. Carroll-Barraud’s children, it transpired, is the rock singer Courtney Love.)

Ms. Fox’s other honors include the Hans Christian Andersen Award, which she received in 1978 for her body of children’s work.

Given the subject matter of Ms. Fox’s books, it is not surprising that some reviewers called them depressing. This did not sit well with her.

“Children know about pain and fear and unhappiness and betrayal,” she said in an interview quoted in the reference work Contemporary Authors. “And we do them a disservice by trying to sugarcoat dark truths. There is an odd kind of debauchery I’ve noticed, particularly in societies that consider themselves ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’: They display the gory details but hide meaning, especially if it is ambiguous or disturbing.”